Ubuntu base and minimal images¶
Broadly speaking, Canonical produces two types of images - a base image and a minimal image. These are available at https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/ and are available for all the clouds and for all the Ubuntu releases.
What are base and minimal images?¶
Base images are those that are directly derived from Ubuntu Server-like images and are meant for general consumption. On the other hand, minimal or minimised images are those that are meant for machine-to-machine interactions, and have some niceties meant for humans stripped out (such as manpages, translations, editors, etc.). A great example would be our k8s images.
State of minimal images from Mantic onwards¶
From Mantic Minotaur 23.10 onwards (including Noble Numbat 24.04 LTS), we have worked through the minimal images to make it more efficient and truly minimal by constructing a cloud-minimal seed. This seed is the list of basic packages that we need in a minimal cloud installation. The package list is then expanded by a program called germinate, which includes the dependencies of the listed packages in the seed. Combined, we get the image manifest, i.e. the list of package names and their respective versions you’d expect to see in a given minimal cloud image.
With this effort, minimal cloud images now are smaller than the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS minimal images. The package count has dropped from 426 to 288 (difference: 138), resulting in a much smaller image size. For example, download qcow2 images have reduced from 337.19MiB to 226.75MiB (difference: 110.44MiB). This was achieved, in part, by reducing the packages installed to only those we feel are required for a functional Ubuntu cloud instance and by removing the installation of “Recommends” packages. Therefore, the minimal images are faster to boot, deploy, provision, etc, as compared to the base images.
What is unminimize? What does it do?¶
unminimize is essentially a script that’s shipped in /usr/bin by a package
called “unminimize”. The goal of this unminimize script is to unminimise the
minimal image and make it as close as possible to a base image. It does this by
re-enabling installation of all documentation in DPKG, restoring system
documentation and man pages, restoring system translations, and then finally
installing some packages on the top, like linux-image-virtual, etc. These
packages make human interaction easier as they include the installation of
basic packages like editors.
To run unminimize, you simply need to call:
$ sudo unminimize